William Martin to sign books in Chatham, Brewster, Orleans

Wednesday

Aug 22, 2012 at 12:01 AMAug 22, 2012 at 10:17 PM

William Martin knows history well and has proven it in nine bestselling novels. His particular genius is connecting American history to the present in a way that shows readers just how important the past still is to modern day readers. He has done it again with his tenth novel, “The Lincoln Letter,” which was released August 21, just in time for the Sept. 22 sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, an event that plays an important role in the story.

Laurie Higgins

William Martin knows history well and has proven it in nine bestselling novels. His particular genius is connecting American history to the present in a way that shows readers just how important the past still is to modern day readers. He has done it again with his tenth novel, “The Lincoln Letter,” which was released August 21, just in time for the Sept. 22 sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, an event that plays an important role in the story.

“The Lincoln Letter” is Martin’s fifth book in the Peter Fallon/Evangeline Carrington series. The novel opens with a fictional last letter President Lincoln wrote before he went to Ford’s Theatre. The letter, to Lieutenant Halsey Hutchinson, requests the return of a very important item that could be detrimental to the nation’s healing if it fell into the wrong hands. The item is Lincoln’s private diary, where he recorded his true feelings about the war and freeing the slaves.

When Peter Fallon is sent a copy of the letter, he can’t resist trying to track down the diary with Evangeline as his reluctant side-kick. The novel alternates between the modern treasure hunt and the past, which focuses on Halsey’s story.

In 1862, Halsey inadvertently comes into possession of Lincoln’s diary. He intends to hand it over to Lincoln himself, but the diary is stolen before he can do so, setting him on a four year adventure to retrieve it and clear his name.

“What I try to do in all of these novels about lost artifacts is have some intrinsic value to the artifact itself,” Martin says. “In ‘Harvard Yard’ it is a Shakespeare manuscript. What a wonderful thing that would be to get your hands on. In this book it’s Lincoln’s diary. These things have some intrinsic value and then some greater significance, whether cultural or political, in the way we live today because the idea that I’m always trying to get at is that we aren’t simply products of our moment in time. We are products of the whole span of American history.”

The decisions that Lincoln made 150 years ago still have implications today. He not only maintained the Union, but solidified Federal power and centralized the government. It’s easy to cast Lincoln in a rosy hue as the savior of the slaves, but in reality he was as racist as anyone else in that era and the Emancipation Proclamation was more of a political maneuver than a compassionate decision.

“People criticized Lincoln for not going further, but as far as he could interpret it, the Emancipation Proclamation was all he could do,” Martin explains. “He could only free the slaves in the rebellious states. He didn’t want to free the slaves in the Border States that had remained loyal: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, because he didn’t want to alienate them. Had they seceded in 1862, the Union would have collapsed and he understood that. So he only moved as far as the Constitution would let him, which happened to be about as far politically as he wanted to go.”

Martin artfully weaves the connections between past and present in a way that makes both stories richer. Peter Fallon finds plenty of corruption and deceit in the present day but Martin deftly shows that it is just business as usual in Washington and that nothing really changes in politics.

In the novel, Lincoln is a man wrestling with his conscience and trying to do what is right for the entire nation. But Martin also highlights all the deceit, corruption, lobbyists and spies who want him to fail, some for ideological reasons and some out of greed.

Martin believes that it is really the powerful middle that has always held our country together and his creation of the character of Halsey represents that. Halsey is just a regular man trying to do the right thing, no matter what the personal cost. It makes for a page-turning read, guaranteed to keep you up at night. And that is just what Martin is shooting for.

“I think this is a good time to be publishing a book about Lincoln, about American politics and the ins and outs of it, the backstabbers and the glory seekers and the self-seekers,” he says. “What I try to do is get people to read these books and have a lot of fun and stay up late – that’s my first goal. But I try to come up with interesting modern parallels so you have something to think about when one of these books is done.”